11/16 New Challenges

Well, that was an ordeal! I had arranged to meet with the apartment manager at her office so that I could pay my deposit and move in. I had even uploaded my Liveroute information from the car so she could track my progress and see my eta. She wasn’t there. I sent her a message after message asking her to chat me. She eventually showed up about 90 minutes late.

Then I found out the apartment wasn’t ready. I’d already heard when I was researching places to live that the previous tenant, Nate I believe his name was, had negotiated a favorable rate in exchange for steady game work as an all-around handyman. He’d gotten in trouble for extorting additional Arpies from the tenants in order to do the work promptly or with brand new parts instead of used and salvaged ones. He’d use old parts anyway, do sloppy work and leave whenever he felt like it with the job still unfinished.

If pressed he would claim he’d gone over budget or was called away to deal with an emergency repair for someone else. He wouldn’t come back until they’d given him more Arpies. The case had been very interesting, and it’s how I knew that the place was available and that there was the potential for game work doing repairs along with it.

What I didn’t know when I sent my profile and references, including tags to my previous game work history and satisfied clients, was that the guy had also frakked the apartment. The bathroom was filthy. Several parts of the plumbing were absent, and yet he’d clearly continued to use it. The kitchen was just as bad. Half eaten food left to rot in old pans on the corroded stovetop. Tiny flies swarmed over plates of mold. and again the appliances that were still there had several parts missing.

There was more rotten food throughout the living room and bedroom. The sparse furniture looked like it had last been left in a Discon’s front yard. Most of the space was filled with moldering food, packaging and broken equipment that had all been gutted for parts. Salvaged engines, heaters, small appliances, air conditioners, self-drive units and, to my amazement, several phones, and N•Viron systems. Older models. The neck straps had been cut.

The manager told me that, in addition to the fraud charges that had been made public, but also with trading with Discons. They’d seized bags full of old currency. Paper money. Along with enough of the scrap and salvage to prove he was guilty beyond doubt. The guys who took the job also interviewed the tenants and posted closed jury game work. The one that accepted agreed amongst themselves to only make the fraud charges public.

No one seems to know what happened to him. I assume he got sentenced to military service or perhaps assigned mandatory sewage work or something. In any case, I’ve offered to help clean the place up if I could somewhere else to sleep until it was all cleaned out. She agreed to my terms, including a generous discount, so long as she could inspect my progress and make sure I wasn’t just scamming. And I agreed to that providing that she’d help out when she came over, and not just watch me struggle on my own.

She’s also agreed to cover the cost of replacement parts, removal game work for the useless scrap, and for any deep cleaning game work I won’t do myself. It’s taken me the best part of a week and it’s still not all cleaned up. I’m absolutely frakked! I’m going to go shopping for a new bed tomorrow, on the manager’s credit. The motel room has served me well enough until now, but I’d like to actually sleep in my own place. I’ve done so much work on it to make it my home, it’d be nice to actually sleep here.